The extinction of memory

“Don’t it always seem to go,” sang Joni Mitchell in Big Yellow Taxi, “That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”. How true. But when it comes to the environment, we increasingly don’t even know what we’ve lost any more. Worse than just the extinction of species is the escalating extinction of memory.

Take whale populations, for instance. Back in the 1980s, Greenpeace waged a very successful campaign to ‘save the whales’, culminating in an international moratorium on whaling. Today, whale numbers have returned to stable levels. But ‘stable’ is not the same as flourishing. In fact, recent genetic evidence suggests that pre-industrial whale populations were much bigger than previously thought; perhaps 10 times bigger than official estimates, and far bigger than today’s depleted numbers. In other words, our society is simply forgetting how bountiful the seas once were. We are beginning to suffer from extinction amnesia.

As a species, we’ve forgotten how many other species we once shared the planet with. Who now remembers the Quagga? This strange creature, half-horse, half-zebra, once roamed the plains of South Africa, until Victorian game hunters shot it into the history books. The same goes for the Thylacine, gone by the 1930s; the Caspian Tiger; the Great Auk; and countless others whose only cultural epitaphs are the mournful monochrome photos snatched of them before their genus expired.

When a habitat or species is lost what also disappears is the awe it once inspired. Can anyone alive today imagine the sight of the millions of buffalo that roamed the North American plains a century and a half ago? What must it have been like to see the migrating flocks of passenger pigeons which, it is said, sometimes darkened the entire sky with their numbers? When we forget, we grow complacent and accepting. Take another example: how aware are we today of the noise of modern life? The CPRE’s ‘tranquility maps’ reveal a landscape awash with noise, even in the most rural areas of the UK; the legendary peace of the British countryside is now best preserved in a Thomas Hardy novel. Without a clear memory of what we have lost, how are we to regain a better quality of life?

Perhaps, one day, future generations will think nothing of a Pacific Ocean cloyed with plastic or an ice-free Arctic, considering these part of the natural order of things. Sometimes one has to simply forgive and forget. But such forgetfulness will be unforgiveable; in reality those generations will have been handed an impoverished wasteland in place of an Eden. They will have experienced what Kiran Desai calls ‘the inheritance of loss’ – only many won’t know they have.

It’s not enough to bemoan what’s gone; but nor is it enough to simply slow the rate of loss – which is all that Governments currently aim towards under the Convention on Biological Diversity. No. What is needed is something more profoundly ambitious; an awe-inspiring new environmentalism for the 21^st century. Our goal should be the restoration of the biosphere to its former glory. Re-wild the wastelands; re-freeze the Arctic; re-forest the Amazon. An impossible dream? Perhaps; but in some ways it’s simply applying the standard operating procedures of the Age of Information. Click the un-do button: halt the damage. Invoke total memory recall: remember what it was that we lost. And then press system restore. It’s time to reboot Planet Earth.